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This chapter takes up this theme in more transnational terms, examining the extensive “repurposing” of participatory-budgeting routines in the context of mainstream experiments in inclusive local governance. The “pasteurized” version of PB favored by the multilateral agencies is seen to have traveled far and fast, but the transformative potential of the original seems to have been lost along the way.

This chapter centers on the storied site of PB’s “invention.” Though still an inspiration to many, the Porto Alegre experience illustrates the political slipperiness of the PB concept, which under more conservative administrations has become a hollowed out version of its former self. Policy models are consequently not always what they seem, even in their sites of authenticity.

The concept of participatory budgeting was developed as a means of bypassing corrupt local elites and creating better governance in developing countries. Applied in the global north, it attempts to give power back to communities to set spending priorities within their neighbourhoods. This chapter examines two attempts at participatory budgeting for the arts in Birmingham – the city council’s Arts Champions scheme and a participatory action research project led by the author. Two key problems highlighted by the case studies are identified. First, funders being reluctant to hand full control to neighbourhoods over how spending is undertaken, with a tendency to push communities toward the funders’ spending priorities. Second, and related to this, is a lack of capacity at neighbourhood level to move beyond the “ideas generation” stage, toward having the confidence to design and commission cultural projects to realise those ideas. This speaks to wider problems in deprived communities – notably education, skills and confidence – that cannot be tackled simply by adding cultural activity.

This chapter explores how, in September 2013, the White House reached out to the Participatory Budgeting Project (PBP) group to survey how the federal government could support PB. The early success of PB in the US provided a new model for beefing up the participation side of open government. White House communications contacted the PBP along with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and together they explored how federal housing and community development funds could be allocated through PB. The PBP also decided to focus more on developing the common tools and resources that could enable PB to grow dramatically across the US and beyond. They also designed new training methods and toolkits to enable community members to play a stronger role in both advocacy and implementation.

This chapter explores the vital role of policy networks in the transnational (re)construction of the PB field, concluding that these are nevertheless invariably connected to centers of political power.

Democratic citizens often feel disempowered by contemporary politics, but deliberative democracy provides an antidote by creating opportunities for the public to engage in meaningful decision making. This chapter introduces readers to a few of those projects, including AmericaSpeaks, Participatory Budgeting, and the CIR and provides insight from one citizen who has engaged in two of those forums. These processes bring diverse citizens together to learn about and discuss public problems with the goal of creating better policy decisions. Initiatives and referenda were initially proposed with similar goals of empowering the public but have become beholden to the same problems that plague the rest of governance, namely the outsized influence of money and the proliferation of manipulative rhetoric. The CIR and processes like it attempt to bridge the decision-making power of initiative elections with the informed judgment gained in deliberative forums.

The conclusion reflects on the analytical lessons have been learned across the two case studies. It suggests that there is evidence that qualitatively different forms of fast policy are at work in each of the sprawling fields of practice that are PB and CCTs, considering what this might mean for the politics of policy “translation.”

Adopts a more global perspective on CCT policy development, considering the roles played by multilateral agencies. In one sense, this is a story of the formidable power of organizations like the World Bank as “knowledge managers.” On the other hand, the limits of the Bank’s hegemonic reach are also revealed: domestic politics continue to exert a major influence on project design and implementation which often contradict preferred paths of policy development.

Reflections #1, “Pursuing projects, following policies,” is the first in a series of reflections that close each section of the book, where we anticipate some of the methodological and interpretative challenges of this critical approach to policy mobility. Here, in conversation with the extended case study method, we characterize our strategy for researching a far-flung selection of interconnected fieldwork sites, which we provisionally style as a distended case study approach.

Chapter 3, “New Ideas for New York City,” explores Mayor Bloomberg’s experiment in South-North policy learning, his ultimately frustrated attempt to replicate the well-publicized successes of the Mexican Oportunidades program. New York City’s struggling CCT program is a sobering reminder of the challenges of “off-the-shelf” policy borrowing, but it also illustrates the persuasive power of evaluation methods and compelling invention narratives.

This chapter first calls attention to the enormous momentum generated behind CCTs as a “paradigm positive” policy program which has been steered, most notably by the World Bank, through a combination of financial incentives and technocratic persuasion. Though even with these strong following winds, CCTs have evolved in some surprising ways.

Chapter 1 critically reviews the literatures on policy transfer, with an eye towards understanding the contributions and limits of orthodox approaches researching policy mobility. It presents a social-constructivist approach that problematizes the inherent tensions between local specificity and global interconnectedness, and the continuous processes of (mis)translation and mutation that this entails.